Timmerman says the left has controlled everything Bush has done in Iraq; or, The Non-Bush Theory of the Bush Calamity

David Horowitz must be in clover. As I pointed out the other day, for years Horowitz has attributed every Bush screw-up in Iraq to the left. According to Horowitz, the left has hemmed Bush in politically so that he had no choice but to pursue an inadequate, doomed policy. As Horowitz saw it, the idiocies and disasters and delusions of the U.S. in Iraq were never Bush’s doing, always the left’s. To my mind, this seemed like the rankest excuse making and projection of Bush’s (and his aides’ and his supporters’) anti-reality stand onto Bush’s enemies.

But now Kenneth Timmerman, a frequent contributor at Horowitz’s FrontPage Magazine, has come out with an entire historical thesis that seems to validate Horowitz’s view of things. As Timmerman tells Jamie Glazov in an FP interview, during the course of the Bush administration, Bush’s enemies on the left have burrowed into the government, where they have pursued a course of systematic sabotage, deliberately seeking to make the president’s policies in Iraq and elsewhere fail.

Here’s an example from the interview. Timmerman writes:

We have heard recently from John Bolton confirmation of another story I tell in the book about Vann Van Diepen, one of the authors of the recent Iran NIE. Van Diepen systematically refused to carry out direct orders from Bolton to enforce non-proliferation sanctions against Iran and North Korea , because he disagreed with the policy.

Scott Carpenter, who had been in charge of the Iran pro-democracy programs at State, recently told the New York Sun that those programs were “dead” because they had been sabotaged by career State Department officials and Democrat political appointees, such as Suzanne Maloney, who now works at Brookings.

Thanks to those efforts, we now have only two policy options when it comes to Iran : acquiesce to an Iranian bomb, or bomb Iran (as French president Sarkozy has said so eloquently). The much better option, which I have advocated in these pages for some time, is to help the people of Iran to overthrow the regime. Thanks to the shadow warriors at State, we no longer have that option.

My question is, if Van Diepen “systematically refused to carry out direct orders from Bolton,” why the heck didn’t Bolton fire him? I guess Bolton, like Bush, is a helpless victim of his own treasonous subordinates.

Further, if Bush’s pro-democracy programs in the State Department were sabotaged by career officials and Democratic appointees, why didn’t Bush do something about that? He could have easily fired the Democratic appointees and, with somewhat more difficulty, moved the career officials to other posts where they could not gum up the works. He could even have told the public about the problem, putting public pressure on the bureaucracy which might have given him more political ability to take action against it. But far from fighting his treasonous bureaucracy, he went along with them, exactly as he did this month with the NIE on Iran. Instead of getting the NIE amended to be more balanced in its assesssments and less damaging to his own position, he authorized its publication in its present, very flawed form and he then endorsed it, lock, stock, and barrel. Yet a vast chorus of Bushites including Horowitz and Bolton immediately cried that the bureaucracy had forced this result on Bush, again creating the picture of Bush as a helpless, even hypnotized innocent in the hands of his enemies, not responsible for his own actions. Bolton even called the NIE a “putsch.”

The victimological whining and excuse-making coming from a supposed “political warrior” like Horowitz and a supposed straight shooter like Bolton is not edifying. These men sound like blacks talking about whites, or like Palestinians talking about Israelis. Nothing is the responsibility of their side. They and their Siegfried-like hero Bush are the oppressed virtuous ubermenschen, under the thumb of the oppressive and infinitely slimy untermenschen.

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A reader writes:

Horowitz is off the mark, of course. But Bolton I see as a victim of those with more power than himself—not subordinates but bosses. The bureaucrat cannot fire at will.

So I’d trust Bolton’s estimate of Van Vann whatsis without saying, “Why didn’t you fire him?” Bolton didn’t have the juice, and Bush didn’t have the juice to keep him in office.

Problem was (and still is), Bush kept too many Clintonistas in office and they’ve sabotaged him for his entire two terms.

LA replies:

You may be right on the specifics of Bolton, though if Bolton was in a position to give direct orders to Van Diepen, it seems to me that he would also have been in a position to fire him or at least move him elsewhere. Yet Timmerman doesn’t even bother giving any explanation of why Bolton did not do anything about a subordinate who was directly disobeying him. The overall picture remains of the Bushites blaming the left, while not doing anything serious to oppose the left, and while also not even feeling that it’s necessary to explain why they weren’t doing anything serious to oppose the left.

Mencius Moldbug writes:

It’s hard for me to believe that, since you write so much about the U.S. federal government, you know so little about how it works. However, as usual, you know what you don’t know—the highest form of wisdom—and you ask, rather than telling. My father was career at State, so let me try to explain.

The idea that the President and his appointees control the executive branch is a historical fiction. It is best compared to the role of the Queen in the present British system. Formally, a bill cannot pass without the Queen’s assent. In practice, her assent is always given. If it was refused, there would be a short period of jaw-dropping and then the formality would be revoked.

The number of layers protecting a van Diepen from a Bolton, or even a Bush, is beyond belief. Career officers at State cannot be hired or fired by their supervisors. They cannot even be reassigned. All personnel actions, including promotions, assignments, disciplinary actions, grievances, etc, etc, are the responsibility of an independent personnel office. If anyone on the political track, from Bolton to Bush, interfered with this process or even tried to, the press would treat the President as though he’d just joined the Nazi Party and come out for deporting the Negroes to Africa. Don’t you remember the U.S. attorneys brouhaha? The White House doesn’t even have true hire-and-fire authority over people who are This is normal for USG and has been for quite a few years. Google “civil service reform” or “Pendleton Act.”

Now, people do have to work together, and it is an overstatement to say that political appointees have no effect at all on the way that USG does what it does. A lot depends on the President’s poll numbers. If they were in the 60-70 percent range and the administration was new, a van Diepen would be bowing and saying yes, sir, as a lot of people did in 2002 and are now regretting. When they are down in the 30s and the administration is near its end, forget it.

LA replies:

While I do not write much about the inner workings of the federal government, I of course know something about the entrenched bureaucracy and the difficulty that modern presidents have had in working their will on it and through it. But Mencius is going beyond that admittedly difficult reality, positing a total presidential incapacity in relation to his own government which is simply false. Thus he says that the president’s situation “is best compared to the role of the Queen in the present British system.” That is an absurd comparison. The Queen has zero, zilch, power in and over the British government. The U.S. President is the head of the excutive branch of the U.S. government.

Further, I repeat that Timmerman said that among the people stopping the president’s policy were Dcmocratic appointees. Also, as the previous commenter who was disagreeing with me on Bolton admitted, Bush kept key Clintonites in place, such as the despicable and obviously treasonous Tenet. Bush could have removed these political appointees, but didn’t. Yet Bush’s defenders keep portraying Bush as helpless to do anything to influence his own government away from its current, anti-Bush course. On one hand, they worship Bush as the incarnation of American strength, determination, and principled and wily leadership; on the other hand, they speak of him as though he were Patty Hurst in the hands of the Symbionese Liberation Army—kidnapped, locked in a closet for weeks, and brainwashed into robbing a bank.

LA adds:

Also, Mencius undercuts his own point when he admits that if the president has political support he can get the bureaucracy to do his will. Well, the president did have much more political support in 2003, yet his defenders still blame everything he did wrong then on the anti-Bush bureaucracy.

A liberal VFR reader writes:

There’s completely ridiculous speculation in the interview you linked to about the power of subordinates. As far as I can tell, there are only two powers at work on Bush’s mind: its limitations, and Cheney.

The left is responsible for Iraq and other Bush stupidities? It’s nonsensical. Until 2006, he bragged about never issuing a veto. Of course not. The left was utterly marginalized throughout the government, including Congress, so Congress never sent him a bill he didn’t ask for. Since 2006, he’s been happy, eager to veto. According to a NYT analysis yesterday, Bush continues to ignore any contrary opinion. Whether you think that’s out of incuriosity, an inability to consider multiple viewpoints, orneriness, vengeance, lack of time, or anything else, the results of his policy-making appear to be wilfully, if not happily, uninformed by any alternate approaches. They fire U.S. attorneys for not being Bushie enough. They marginalize, ignore or lose career government scientists for talking about science. You think they can’t get rid of a policy person? Or simply ignore him?

When they thought Bush’s policies were successful and beneficial, Horowitz et al. gave him all the credit, finding no role for, or success of, “the left.” If Horowitz is intelligent and honest, what is it that makes him change his own mind? Why is it that before, everything Bush did was his own genius; but now, everything he does is his opponent’s idiocity?

This reminds me of Rove telling Charlie Rose a couple of weeks ago that in the fall of 2002, it was Congress (then he corrected himself to “Senate,” which I think was Democratic at that moment), not the administratoin, that was beating the drums for war in Iraq. The demonstrable absurdity was informative enough. (Or if not absurdity, then self-promotion. Responding to Rose’s incredulity, Rove gleefully said, “You’ll see, it’ll all be explained in my forthcoming book.”) Not only the 2002 congressional leaders and not only the printed record, but even Rove’s erstwhile adminisration colleagues dismissed the remark as crap. Their dismissal was additionally informative, as it tends to show that now that Rove no longer has a White House perch from which to hurl darts, his former colleagues seem to be less cowed by him.

The reader who first commented above writes:

Nice discussion—but the liberal VFR reader is wrong about Bush asking for the bills that came from a Dem Congress to his desk. He signed bills he had campaigned against—campaign finance reform—which he should have vetoed on First Amendment grounds. Which is why I didn’t vote for him in ‘04. He is an unprincipled scoundrel and doesn’t even know it.

Mencius replies:

I certainly agree that Bush could have done much, much more to fight the civil service. Perhaps a better example of an insurgent Republican president in Washington was Reagan. Who did do more, much more. But by historical standards, his impact was still negligible.

But I said “compared to” the Queen, not “equivalent to.” The power of the presidency has been decreasing more or less steadily over time since Lincoln, though the curve is complicated by figures such as FDR who set their weight behind, rather than against, the bureaucracy. The presidency is following in the path of the British monarchy. It is just a century or two behind. (Even for much of the 19th century the British throne still had real political power.)

Bush is the head of the executive branch of the U.S. government. Elizabeth II is the head of state of Britain. I suspect that Britain is actually a good deal readier for a royal attempt to reassert authority, Meiji Restoration style, than the U.S. is for a President who actually attempts to manage the U.S. government as if he were its CEO.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at December 15, 2007 10:30 AM | Send